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To be honest, I’m okay with that—one of the perks of having a personal project is that only metric that really matters is your own satisfaction.

For a while, I did have Google Analytics set up on The Session. But I started to feel a bit uncomfortable about willingly opening up a wormhole between my site and the Google mothership. It bothered me that Adblock Plus would show that one ad had been blocked on the site. There are no ads on the site, but the presence of the Google Analytics code was providing valuable information to Google—and its advertiser customer base—so I can understand why it gets flagged up like any other unwanted tracking.

Theoretically, users have a way of opting out of this kind of tracking by switching on the Do Not Track header (if it isn’t switched on by default). Looking at the default JavaScript code that Google provides for setting up Google Analytics, I don’t see any mention of navigator.doNotTrack.

For the love of mercy, don’t actually use that code—it’s completely untested and probably causes more harm than good. But you can see the idea that I’m trying to get at, right? Google Analytics most definitely counts as tracking so it seems like the ideal use-case for Do Not Track.

It raises a few questions:

Is anyone doing this already? It might well be that the answer is “no”, not because of any reluctance to respect user preferences but because the doNotTrack spec is very much in flux.

Would you consider doing this?

If you were to do this, could you foresee getting pushback from within your own company?